Original title: Bringing usability testing to the front lines: IV smart pump evaluation with critical care nurses at a national conference
Brenda Abena Nyarko, Seonhun Lee, Gina L Georgadarellis, Frank C Sup Iv +1 · September 2026
Medical devices like intravenous smart pumps deliver medicine directly into patients. Testing how easy they are to use usually happens in single hospital labs, making it hard to reach many experienced bedside nurses. To solve this, researchers created a portable testing setup and brought it to a national critical care nursing conference. They built standardized stations where real nurses completed scripted patient care tasks. While nurses worked, the team tracked their eye movements with wearable trackers, monitored body signals, observed errors, and recorded spoken thoughts. Nurses also scored their workload and ranked which pumps they preferred. The researchers found this method successfully creates a repeatable way to test bedside technologies with frontline staff while keeping strict experimental control.
You're testing a new kitchen gadget in a lab with a few chefs you invited. You only get a handful of opinions, and the test kitchen doesn't match their real workspace. In this paper, the gadget is an IV pump and the lab is a booth at a national nursing conference, where practicing nurses test it on scripted tasks while their eyes and heart rate are tracked.
Hospital nurses rarely get to shape the devices they use daily. This method brings rigorous usability testing to national nursing conferences, so frontline critical-care nurses can evaluate IV smart pumps where they already gather. Manufacturers and health systems get real feedback from intended users without building expensive labs.
The abstract doesn't say what the usability findings were or how the conference method compares to lab testing in data quality or cost. It only describes the approach and its intended use.
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Bringing usability testing to the front lines: IV smart pump evaluation with critical care nurses at a national conference — Brenda Abena Nyarko, Seonhun Lee, Gina L Georgadarellis et al. — MethodsX — doi:10.1016/j.mex.2026.104140
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.